Navigating through the complex features of Salesforce can often be overwhelming, especially for small businesses or those with budget constraints.

Fortunately, there are countless alternatives in the CRM landscape to consider. In this article, we’ve done the homework for you, carefully curating a list of the top ten Salesforce alternatives for 2023. Ready to explore? Let’s jump in.

Key Takeaways

• Salesforce offers a wide range of features, including account and contact management, opportunity management, lead management, mobile functionality, and sales forecasting.
• While Salesforce has its advantages, such as extensive features, scalability, customizability, and integration with various software and services, it can also be complex, expensive, and requires significant implementation and training.
• There are several Salesforce alternatives available, including Teamgate, Zoho, Insightly, Pipedrive, Freshsales, Copper CRM, Zendesk, Agile CRM, Bitrix24, and HubSpot.
• These alternatives offer unique features and benefits, such as customization options, dynamic team collaboration, or AI-powered capabilities, making them ideal for businesses of all sizes across various industries.

Table of Contents:

• What is Salesforce
• Top Salesforce Alternatives
• Selecting the Right CRM for your Business
• FAQs: Salesforce Alternatives

What is Salesforce

Salesforce is a world-renowned software company recognized primarily for its CRM product, Salesforce Customer 360. It offers a diverse suite of applications focused on sales, service, marketing, commerce, and more, supporting businesses of all sizes across various industries.

At its core, Salesforce is a technology that helps businesses manage and analyze customer interactions and relationships. It compiles customer data from various sources into a single repository, enabling businesses to track interactions, manage sales opportunities, and execute targeted marketing campaigns. It is used by many businesses, from small startups to large multinational corporations, and across sectors such as retail, tech, healthcare, financial services, and more.

Key Features of Salesforce

Here are five key elements that set Salesforce apart from its competitors:

• Account and contact management: Provides businesses with a comprehensive view of their customers and insights from social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
• Lead management: Assists in making smarter decisions about marketing budget allocation by helping businesses track leads and optimize campaigns.
• Mobile functionality: Salesforce allows users to log calls, respond to leads, or check dashboards from anywhere. The mySalesforce feature can also be customized to match a brand’s look and feel.
• Sales forecasting: Salesforce’s sales forecasting tools offer fast, easy, and accurate real-time views into team forecasts.

Pros & Cons of Using Salesforce

As with any software solution, Salesforce comes with both advantages and potential drawbacks. Below are some of the pros and cons of using Salesforce.

Pros:

• Extensive range of features: Salesforce offers a wide array of features for sales, service, marketing, collaboration, and analytics.
• Scalability: Salesforce is highly scalable, allowing businesses to grow and add more features or users as needed. It can cater to the needs of small and large businesses.
• Customizability: Salesforce offers significant customization options. Businesses can modify layouts, add fields, change workflows, create custom reports, and more to suit their specific needs.
• Integration: Salesforce integrates well with various other software and services, including email, social media, ERP systems, and more. This allows for a more cohesive technology infrastructure.

Cons:

• Complexity: Due to its extensive features and capabilities, Salesforce can be complex and overwhelming, especially for small businesses or those with less technical experience.
• Cost: Salesforce can be quite expensive, especially when adding premium features or additional users. Smaller businesses may find it less affordable than other CRM options.
• Implementation and training: The implementation of Salesforce can be time-consuming and might require training for users to understand and utilize the platform effectively.

Salesforce Rating

4.3/5 (G2)

Top Salesforce Alternatives

If you’re looking to either implement a new CRM or make the switch, there are many options available within the market. It is important to analyse each offering in conjunction with business and sales needs to ensure successful onboarding and beyond. Read on to learn more about the top 10 Salesforce alternatives for your company.

Teamgate CRM

Teamgate is an easy-to-use CRM software solution offering many features designed to streamline and enhance your sales process. It allows businesses to effectively manage all stages of their sales pipeline, from marketing and lead generation to conversion and customer satisfaction.

While Teamgate offers a robust suite of features, its ease of use and intuitive design are perhaps its most significant advantages. The software is easy to set up, navigate, and customize, with an attractive interface that enhances the user experience.

On the other hand, Salesforce has a more complex user interface, which might require a considerable amount of training and time for users to get accustomed to.

Teamgate CRM Key Features

• Custom fields: Teamgate’s custom fields allow for comprehensive, bespoke tracking of leads, enabling a more detailed understanding of customer profiles and needs.
• Advanced filtering: Teamgate features robust filtering tools, enabling users to easily sort and search through their data. It supports both standard and customizable filters, allowing for nuanced searching based on industry, lead ownership, geographic location, and more.
• Dynamic team collaboration: Each lead, client, or deal is assigned an ‘owner’, the team member responsible for its management. However, other team members can be added as collaborators to ensure all relevant parties stay in the loop.
• Integrations: Teamgate is designed to smoothly integrate with various external tools, enhancing its overall utility.

Teamgate CRM Rating

4.8/5 (Capterra)

4.6/5 (G2)

Zoho CRM

Zoho offers tools to streamline and automate sales activities, helping reduce redundancies and manual work. With Zoho CRM, businesses can capture and score leads, manage contacts, track deal progress, and automate workflows, all within a user-friendly interface.

The software’s customization capabilities allow you to mold your CRM to fit your unique business needs, whether in terms of data collection, viewing information, or even language and currency preferences.

When it comes to being an alternative to Salesforce, Zoho CRM stands out for several reasons. For one, it is generally considered more user-friendly, with a simpler, more intuitive interface, making it easier for team members to adopt. It also tends to be more affordable than Salesforce, providing more value for smaller businesses or those with tight budgets.

Zoho CRM Key Features

• Automation: Automate routine sales, marketing, and support tasks, leaving more time to focus on your customers.
• Process management: Keep track of every step of your sales pipeline and make sure all sales reps follow those steps.
• Customer journey: Create personalized customer journeys and receive real-time insights to make the necessary adjustments.

Zoho CRM Rating

4/5 (G2)

Insightly

Insightly is a modern, scalable, and affordable CRM software designed for fast-growing companies. Its robust features and cloud-based platform make it an attractive option for businesses that want enterprise-level solutions without the associated costs.

Beyond the key features mentioned above, Insightly also offers features for customer email management, performance dashboards and reporting, and mobile accessibility. It provides businesses with a comprehensive toolkit to manage their customer relationships, monitor business performance, and operate efficiently even on the go.

Insightly Key Features

• Advanced permissions: Control access to data and ensure that your team always has the right access.
• Process automation: Create email reminders, onboarding stages, and other automation to help scale your business faster.
• Lead management: Capture key information about your leads and prioritize them based on set criteria.

Insightly Rating

4.2/5 (G2)

Pipedrive

Pipedrive is a powerful, intuitive sales software designed to turbocharge your sales processes. The platform offers a variety of features, including sales pipeline management, automation, insights and reporting, and email and communication tracking.

Pipedrive offers seamless integration with over 400 business applications, making it a highly versatile choice for a wide range of businesses.

Pipedrive Key Features

• Sales pipeline: Manage the entire sales process from start to finish and organize deals according to the stages of your pipeline.
• Automation: Eliminate repetitive tasks and focus on high-priority to-do’s.
• Reporting: Extract valuable insights from your sales data, and add custom fields to only track the KPIs you’re interested in.

Pipedrive Rating:

4.5/5 (G2)

Freshsales

Freshsales is a sales CRM trusted by over 60,000 businesses. One of the distinguishing features of Freshsales is its AI-powered capabilities, which allow you to prioritize high-intent leads and make informed decisions about which deals to pursue.

Customer testimonials highlight how Freshsales has helped businesses significantly reduce no-show rates, increase customer acquisition, and decrease time spent on administrative tasks.

Freshsales Key Features

• Unified CRM: The Freshsales Suite provides a unified CRM for teams across different departments.
• Intelligent workflow: This feature allows for task automation, improving efficiency across your sales process.
• Predictive deal insights: Freshsales leverages AI to provide intelligent insights about deals that have a high probability of closure.

Freshsales Rating

4.6/5 (G2)

Copper CRM

Copper CRM is designed to simplify and automate business processes. It’s known for its intuitive design, making onboarding swift and painless. It also comes with a mobile app to ensure you can manage relationships on the go.

Notably, it boasts powerful integrations with popular apps and tools, making it a flexible choice that adapts to your existing business processes.

Copper CRM Key Features

• Organize contacts: Maintain a comprehensive database of all your relationships in one place.
• Automate tasks: Set up recurring tasks and notifications, ensuring you never miss an important action or event.
• Track deals: Monitor the status of deals and manage sales activities efficiently, ensuring no opportunity slips through the cracks.

Copper CRM Rating

4.5/5 (G2)

Zendesk

Zendesk is a modern sales CRM designed to empower sales teams and boost revenue growth. It offers a full suite of tools to automate tasks, track activities, and manage contacts and deals, thus improving team productivity. The CRM also gives a full view of customer data across sales and service, enabling teams to deliver personalized customer experiences.

Its flexible pricing plans offer a solution for every stage of a business, from startups to large enterprises.

Zendesk Key Features

• Integrations: Install apps from the marketplace and integrate Zendesk Sell into your existing tech stack.
• Forecasting: Accurately forecast and manage your pipeline in real-time.
• Full customer view: Have full visibility of your prospects and customers during every step of their buying journey.

Zendesk Rating

4.3/5 (G2)

Agile CRM

Agile CRM is built as a next-generation, cloud-based SaaS service that is mobile-ready, making it fast and simple to use.

Its advanced sales and marketing tools, including contact management, deal tracking, telephony, appointment scheduling, and gamification, are designed to supercharge your business processes. It also includes marketing tools for a seamless marketing process.

Agile CRM Key Features

• Gamification: Help your team stay focused and encourage collaboration and competition.
• Mobile and email marketing: Never lose an opportunity to send out personalized emails and SMS.
• Social suite: Easy social media integration.

Agile CRM Rating

4/5 (G2)

Bitrix24

Bitrix24 is a CRM tool that brings together a plethora of business functions into one platform. It offers over 35 business tools, including lead management, omnichannel marketing, team management, and communication features.

Moreover, it’s well-suited for remote work, offering features like an online time clock, video conferencing, online tasks, project management, and a mobile CRM, making it an all-in-one platform for running businesses efficiently.

Bitrix24 Key Features

• Lead management: Optimize lead-to-customer conversion with automated lead generation and management.
• Omni-channel marketing: The software supports a range of marketing channels, from email marketing and online ads to Facebook ads and more.
• Optimized client service: Get a unified space for interacting with clients through live chats, web forms, and VoIP telephony.

Bitrix24 Rating

4.1/5 (G2)

HubSpot CRM

HubSpot is a user-friendly software solution that aims to streamline and simplify various aspects of customer relationship management. The platform was built to maximize efficiency and productivity, with features designed to automate and enhance key sales and marketing processes.

The platform integrates seamlessly with other HubSpot tools, providing a unified, centralized workspace for managing contacts, tracking sales activity, and analyzing performance metrics.

Hubspot CRM Key Features

• Sales pipeline dashboard: Analyze and track sales activity in real-time with a visually intuitive dashboard;
• Detailed reporting: Get reports on productivity, sales activity, or individual sales reps performance;
• Prospect tracking: Get notified when a prospect opens and email or visits your website.

Hubspot CRM Rating

4.4/5 (G2)

Selecting the Right CRM for your Business

The process of choosing the right Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system for a business cannot be overstated in terms of its impact on overall business and sales performance. The CRM forms the backbone of an organization’s customer interactions, shaping how effectively the company communicates with its customers, tracks leads, and manages sales. Therefore, it’s critical to align the choice of CRM with specific business and sales needs to ensure that the tool can effectively support, not hinder, the business process.

When considering the myriad options available on the market, it’s vital to conduct thorough research to ascertain the CRM’s capabilities, its user interface, customizability, integration with existing systems, and its overall compatibility with the business’ needs and workflows. This research should involve reviewing customer testimonials, expert opinions, and in-depth product comparisons to make an informed choice.

Whilst the options discussed in this article are all suitable alternatives to Salesforce, Teamgate CRM offers a unique blend of simplicity, flexibility, and a dedicated and hands-on support team (including free migration!) that truly sets it apart. To learn more about what how their team can aid in your sales performance – book a free system demo or get started with a 14 day free trial.

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FAQs: Salesforce Alternatives

Why should I consider alternatives to Salesforce?

While Salesforce is a leading CRM platform, it may not suit everyone’s budget, feature requirements, or usability preferences. Exploring alternatives can help you find a CRM that better aligns with your business goals and operational needs.

What criteria were used to select these Salesforce alternatives?

The alternatives were selected based on their feature set, pricing, user-friendliness, integration capabilities, customer support, and overall market reputation.

How can a different CRM benefit my business?

Choosing a CRM that closely matches your business processes can enhance productivity, improve customer relationships, and streamline operations, ultimately leading to better business outcomes.

Are these alternatives suitable for small businesses?

Yes, the list includes CRM options that cater to businesses of all sizes, including small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with varying budgets and needs.

How do these alternatives compare in terms of pricing?

Each alternative includes options that offer free tiers, pay-as-you-go plans, and scalable enterprise solutions.

Can these alternatives integrate with other business tools?

Most of the CRM alternatives listed offer robust integration capabilities, allowing seamless connection with popular business tools like email marketing platforms, customer support systems, and productivity apps.

What support options are available for these CRM alternatives?

The blog discusses the customer support offerings for each alternative, including availability of online resources, live chat, phone support, and dedicated account managers.

How can I choose the best CRM alternative for my business?

The blog provides insights on assessing your business needs, evaluating the features and pricing of each CRM, and considering user reviews to make an informed decision on the best CRM alternative.

Where can I find more detailed reviews of these CRM alternatives?

Links to in-depth reviews and additional resources for each CRM alternative are provided in the blog, helping you gain a comprehensive understanding before making a decision.

Are there any free CRM alternatives to Salesforce?

Yes, several CRM alternatives mentioned in the blog offer free versions or trial periods, allowing you to test their features without financial commitment.